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More than 10,000 Hotmail passwords leaked on web
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 06 October 2009, 22:32 IST
Bangalore: Microsoft has confirmed the rumors that password of thousands of Microsoft Live accounts have been hacked and posted on the web. The user name and password is posted on public upload website Pastebin.com. BBC News claims that it has seen a list of more than 20,000 more names and passwords that have been posted online. At first only Hotmail user names and passwords were leaked but now BBC says that the list contains e-mail addresses and passwords from Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other service providers also.
Neowin.net was the first to publish details of the original attack. It said the accounts were posted on 1st October to pastebin.com, a website commonly used by developers to share code. The Pastebin website is currently down for maintenance due to so much traffic on the site "Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications," said Paul Dixon, Owner of pastebin.com to Neowin.
It seems that the users of these accounts have been victims of a wide scale phishing scam. A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that the company doesn't store passwords in the clear and said its security team has been investigating the leak since this weekend. "Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers," she wrote in an email to The Register. "As part of that investigation, we determined that this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts."
Many email accounts are often connected to bank accounts. Security experts are advising email users to change their password just as a precaution.
